Part 2

"Go on, Mr. Sanborn," the physician said again, eagerness creeping into his tone.

"I was thrown so hard against the side of the ship that I was knocked senseless. When I came to I could see nothing through the fused quartz windows but stars. The currents that had seized the ship were too strong. I could do nothing against them. There was another crash. I awoke on a wooded hill. A strange being was working over me. I had landed on another planet in another solar system. The people are very advanced but frightful-looking. Its name, as nearly as I can pronounce it, is Urcanus."

"How'd you get back here?" The burly attendant grinned and made an eye-gesture at the driver behind Henry's back.

"The Urcanians built a ship for me. They've known the principle of the reversed magnetic field for ages. Why, they've perfected it in the fourth dimension and even gone on and experimented with it in the fifth. Usru, one of their greatest minds, came with me. I'll introduce you to him after we've seen the ship--if he's willing."

"Can he speak English?" Bender asked.

"Yes. And I can speak Urcanian. But they don't use their spoken language much now. They have instruments by which they tune in on each other's minds. I couldn't use them. They require a different brain structure--nerves more sensitive, more perfectly controlled. Oh, they've got wonderful machines. Why, they have a little memory-prober that can read a man's life history from his mind!"

"Urcanus must be a very moral planet," Bender smiled.

"It is. But wait until you see that anti-gravity ship! Let's go out there right now! It's only about two miles up the road through the gap, then you walk about half a mile."

Bender turned to the uniformed attendant.

"Edgar," he said, his voice vibrant, "we're going to take a look."

* * * * *

Earthlings, as we have found from our studies of the planet since Henry came among us, have a faith in science that is pathetic. Their wisest believe that to science nothing is impossible. We, who, in so many fields have carried science to its utmost limits, know its sad futility.

Scientific curiosity dominated Bender. He and Henry climbed into the chariot. I shut out of my consciousness the discord and stench of its departure by concentrating upon the minds of the waiter and his employer.

What I read there made clear that my conclusions, which I reached long before I launched upon this expedition, were correct. These two were typical earthlings. Their kind, and even lower types, make up the bulk of the population of the planet, so Henry himself admits. Almost incapable of thought, they surrendered themselves now to the rush of feeling welling upward from their flesh.

"Suppose he's right!" the waiter quavered. He was ready to worship Henry as a demigod. Yet alongside this half-conscious impulse quivered urgings to hound my associate to the asylum, to the jail, to the rack and faggot, were they still available in that mad world.

"Bosh!" Doubt underlay the tone of certainty the proprietor felt he owed it to his superior position to assume. Then he voiced openly the inherent cruelty of emotion--benevolent only when protective of what the individual esteems in some way a part of himself.

"Bender's a fool to let that loony take him off on that wild-goose chase. He ought to be kicked out of his job."

I advanced the G-ray to full strength, making ready for Henry's return.

The chariot approached rapidly. Bender was driving, for it required the combined strength of both big males to hold Henry between them on the rear seat. The air clashed with the vibrations of Henry's screams.

"But it is there, I tell you! Usru lifted it up in the air with his distance levitator. I told you they've got wonderful machines. He turned on his G-ray and made it invisible! It's hanging over that field, but we couldn't see it. I tell you it is there!"

"Why, sure it's there," agreed the big male called Edgar. "By tomorrow it'll settle down again; then we'll drive over and take a look at it."

As they stopped at the curb, Edgar leaned out and explained to the proprietor in a hoarse whisper. "He raised such hell about this here Usru, as he calls him, Doctor Bender made us bring him back so's to ca'm him down a little."

Protected by the full strength of the G-ray, invisible now even to Henry's eyes, I awaited the denouement.

Henry turned a pleading face toward the waiter, who hovered discreetly in the rear of the proprietor.

"You saw him! You saw Usru!" he urged. "He might have seemed dim--like a shadow almost--but you did see him, didn't you?"

"I never saw nobody but you," the waiter replied, backing away a little farther. "You was talking to yourself all the time. Sensible English at first. Then you went clean off your nut and began to blab gibberish and work your eyes and make crazy faces."

For such cerebration as was possible to him, the waiter's conclusion was logical. Henry was capable only of oral communication, which we seldom use because it is inadequate for expressing our delicate shadings of thought. Having two eyes and an almost inflexible countenance, his efforts to use the facial gestures and eye movements and mouth positions with which we eke out oral speech were indeed alarming.

"What does this here Usru look like?" The proprietor, with what is doubtless a characteristic racial impulse to make brutal sport of another's wretchedness, kept repeating the question until he finally caught my distracted companion's attention.

"He's a little under three feet tall," Henry cried. "His body is only half the size of his head and he has no legs. But he has six arms. He uses two to grasp with and the other four to glide with instead of walking. He has one eye on a sort of stem or tube, and it is luminous. He has an organ he hears with and it's got other senses we haven't. It looks like a sort of fleshy blossom on the top of his head."

"Better drive on, Doctor," Edgar chuckled to Bender. "We might see it if we stick around here."

Bender gave Edgar a reproving glance but started the motor. As the chariot moved away, Henry struggled violently.

"Let me out!" he shrieked. "I tell you he is here! He's flooded himself with the G-ray and you can't see him! Usru! Us----"

Edgar's huge hand clamped down upon his mouth. The chariot roared away, gathering speed with every revolution of its clumsy wheels.

* * * * *

I rose. The table was between me and the two males of the drink shop. Before disposing of them, I reviewed what I had learned. Henry had planned to impart to his kind the knowledge of the anti-gravity field and establish communication between the earth and Urcanus--other planets. That would infect other worlds with the earth's recurrent mental disease--war. On Urcanus are limitless stores of metals which earthlings esteem precious and greedily desire. Urcanians cannot risk contact with a race thinking so far down in their emotions--with their bodies, instead of their heads. We have bred away the body to just enough to support the sac that holds our brains--our real selves.

What would these two creatures before me attempt, endowed with Urcanian knowledge? Now they were shaking and gasping with ribald glee as they repeated choice bits of Henry's conduct. Pity! Here it was reversed, become wanton, brainless brutality.

I rapped upon the table loudly--three times.

The earthlings stiffened into rigid, wildly staring images. They did not reason that Henry might have told the truth. Emotion discarded the obvious and invoked the occult. I proceeded to supply them with ample premises. Here is what they saw.

The glass of stale yellow liquid, raised of course by my grasping hands, to them seemed to rise of itself. They saw it hang suspended in air. Then, while they clung together, uttering little moaning sounds, it seemed slowly to fade into nothingness as I brought it within the aura of my personal G-ray.

I turned my atomic disintegrator upon the table, set at slow speed. They saw the flimsy structure crumble bit by bit to dust, and grain by grain, the dust dissolve into nothingness.

I turned off the G-ray and fronted them, thrusting out my eye-tube and making it its most luminous. That released the waiter's vasomotor processes. He tore at the proprietor's clutching hands, striving to loosen them.

"My God!" he babbled. "What that guy had--it's catching! I see what he said he saw!"

With a piercing howl, he wrenched loose the proprietor's fingers and went away in long, high, bounding leaps. The proprietor sagged slowly down upon the gravel, a loose, blubbering heap.

I effaced myself from human sight with the G-ray and tuned the arrester ray of the distance control upon the chariot. That stopped it. A heavier charge rendered its occupants helpless. Even against the drag of earth's heavy atmosphere my sturdy little individual inertia and friction compensator enabled me to reach the machine in a twinkling.

Henry was happy to go back with me to the ship. He was pulsating with horror at the thought of incarceration among the insane. He seethed with disgust at the stupidity of his kind. From these emotional premises he deduced a compelling desire to return with me to Urcanus where he is understood and honored.

[Illustration: "He was dead when I found him beneath my laboratory window."]

He will be happy. He was dead when I found him in the wreckage of his ship beneath my laboratory window. He is alive because of our skill. Earth has no science able to maintain life in him a month. On Urcanus we can observe him for centuries, studying the psychology of development as we step him up stage by stage toward our own perfection of mental and physical organization. When he is useful to us no longer, there remains euthanasia.